Rewired

by James Patrick Kelly

  There was only one problem.

  Bash had not instructed his newspaper to swap functions.

  This impulsive, inexplicable toggling by his highly reliable newspaper scared Bash very much. Proteopape simply did not do such things. Eleven years ago, Bash had first engineered the substance with innumerable safeguards, backups and firewalls specifically intended to prevent just such herky-jerky transitions. In all the time since, out of billions of uses, there had been no recorded instances of proteopape malfunctioning. Even when sustaining up to seventy-five-percent damage, proteopape continued to maintain functionality. (Beyond such limits, proteopape would just shut down altogether.) The miracle material that had transformed so much of the twenty-first century’s media landscape simply did not crash.

  And if proteopape were suddenly to develop a glitch — Well, imagining the immense and catastrophic repercussions from any flaws in the ubiquitous material raised shivers with the magnitude of tsunamis along Bash’s spine.

  Having assimilated the very possibility that his fabled invention could behave in unpredictable ways, Bash gave his newspaper a shake, hoping to expunge this anomaly by the most primitive of engineering tactics. But the newspaper stubbornly continued to function as a movie screen, so Bash focused for clues on the actual movie being displayed across his ex-newspaper.

  This particular sheet of proteopape on which Bash had been reading his newspaper measured approximately two feet by three feet. Possessing the stiffness and texture of heavy-bond dumb-paper, yet not quite as rigid as parchment, this sheet of proteopape had been folded in half vertically, producing four different faces, two outer and two inner. A bit old-fashioned, Bash preferred to read his newspaper on multiple pages, allowing him to refer backwards if he wished simply by eyeballing a previous face of his newspaper. Of course, upon finishing with the fourth page of the paper, Bash simply turned back to the front, where the fifth page was now automatically displayed, with pages six, seven and eight following.

  But now every page revealed only the same movie, a quartet of active images. Bash turned the newspaper upside down, hoping to erase the unrequested show, but the inscribed sensors in the newspaper merely registered the new orientation and flipped the movie upright again.

  Bash recognized the leering face of Groucho Marx, one of his father’s favorite actors. Groucho wore some kind of ridiculous military uniform. Duck Soup, then. Now Margaret Dumont entered the scene, all dowager-haughty. But although the actions of the actors were canonically familiar, the conversation that followed bore no resemblance to any extant Hollywood script.

  “So,” said Groucho, in his familiar intonations which the MEMS speakers of the proteopape reproduced with high fidelity, “the little lady who wants to waste her mind and talents on artsy-fartsy stuff finally deigns to show up. Well, I’m afraid I’ve lost all interest in whatever crap you wanted me to watch.”

  “Okay, granted, I’m a little late,” replied Dumont fruitily. “But you did promise after the Woodies that you’d come with me to hang out with my pals.”

  As this warped yet still meaningful dialogue from his personal life began to resonate with Bash, he started to feel queasy. He laid the newspaper nearly flat on the breakfast table, right atop his plate of auk eggs and fried plantains with mango syrup, and as the crease separating the half-pages disappeared, the movie redrew itself to fill the whole expanse of one side.

  Groucho struck a mocking pose, one hand cradling his chin, the other with cigar poised at his brow. “Well, a self-important louse like me can’t be bothered with that bunch of crazy amateur artistes you hang out with. Such crazy ideas! So I’ve decided to abandon you and return to my cloistered sterile existence.”

  “Hit the road, then, you jerk! But I’ll have the last laugh! You just wait and see!”

  With that parting sally, Dumont and Marx vanished from Bash’s newspaper. But the words and images that comprised Bash’s regular morning blue-toothed installment of The Boston Globe did not reappear. The sheet of proteopape remained a frustrating virginal white, unresponsive to any commands Bash gave it.

  After his frustrated attempts to regain control of the newspaper, Bash gave up, reluctantly conceding that this sheet of proteopape was dead. He slumped back in his chair with a nervous sigh, admitting to himself that the origin of this sabotage was all too evident.

  Why, oh why had he ever agreed to a date with Dagny Winsome?

  2

  The Big Chill

  York and Adelaide Applebrook had gone bust in the big dotcom crash that had inaugurated the twenty-first century. Their entrepreneurial venture — into which they had sunk their own lifesavings and millions of dollars more from various friends, relatives and venture capitalists — had consisted of a website devoted to the marketing of Japanese poetry. Behind the tasteful interactive facade of Haiku Howdy! had been nothing more than a bank of public domain images — Oriental landscapes, for the most part — and a simplistic poetry generator. The visitor to Haiku Howdy! would input a selection of nouns and adjectives that the software would form into a haiku. Matched with an appropriate image, the poem could be e-mailed to a designated recipient. Initially offered as a free service, the site was projected to go to pay-per-use status in a year or two, with estimated revenues often million dollars a year.

  This rudimentary site and whimsical service represented the grand sum of the Applebrooks’ inspiration and marketing plan.

  The fact that at the height of their “success,” in the year 1999, they named their newborn son Basho, after the famous master of haiku, was just one more token of their supreme confidence in their scheme.

  When Haiku Howdy! collapsed after sixteen months of existence, having burned through millions and millions of dollars of OPM, the Applebrooks had cause to rethink their lifestyle and goals. They moved from Seattle to the less pricey rural environs of Medford, Oregon, and purchased a small pear orchard with some leftover funds they had secretly squirreled away from the screamingly burned investors. They took a vow then and there to have nothing further to do with any hypothetical future digital Utopia, making a back-to-the-land commitment similar to that made by many burnt-out hippies a generation prior.

  Surely the repentant, simple-living Applebrooks never reckoned that their only child, young Basho, would grow up to revolutionize, unify and dominate the essential ways in which digital information was disseminated across all media.

  But from his earliest years Bash exhibited a fascination with computers and their contents. Perhaps his prenatal immersion in the heady dotcom world had imprinted him with the romance of bytes and bauds. In any case, Bash’s native talents (which were considerable; he tested off the high end of several scales) were, from the first, bent toward a career in information technologies.

  Bash zipped through public schools, skipping several grades, and enrolled at MIT at age fifteen. Socially, Basho Applebrook felt awkward amidst the sophisticated elders of his generation. But in the classroom and labs he excelled. During his senior year on campus he encountered his most important success in the field of moletronics, the science of manipulating addressable molecules, when he managed to produce the first fully functional sheet of proteopape.

  Alone late one night in a lab, Bash dipped a standard blank sheet of high quality dumb-paper into a special bath where it absorbed a tailored mix of dopant molecules. (This bath was the four hundred and thirteenth reformulation of his original recipe.) Removing the paper, Bash placed it in a second tub of liquid. This tub featured a lattice of STM tweezers obedient to computer control. Bash sent a large file into the tub’s controllers, and, gripping hold of each doped molecule with invisible force pincers, the device laid down intricate circuitry templates into the very molecules of the paper.

  Junctions bloomed, MEMS proliferated. Memory, processors, sensors, a GPS unit, solar cells, rechargeable batteries, speakers, pixels, a camera and wireless modem: all arrayed themselves invisibly and microscopically throughout the sheet of paper.

&
nbsp; Removing the paper from its complexifying wash, Bash was pleased to see on its glistening face a hi-res image. Depicted was a small pond with a frog by its edge, and the following haiku by Bash’s namesake:

  Old pond

  Frog jumps in

  Splash!

  Bash tapped a control square in the corner of the display, and the image became animated, with the frog carrying out the poem’s instructions in an endless loop, with appropriate soundtrack.

  Bash’s smile, observed by no one, lit up the rafters.

  Thus was born “protean paper,” or, as a web-journalist (nowadays remembered for nothing else but this coinage) later dubbed it, “proteopape.”

  Bash’s miraculous process added merely hundredths of a cent to each piece of paper processed. For this token price, one ended up with a sheet of proteopape that possessed magnitudes more processing power than an old-line supercomputer.

  In effect, Bash had created flexible, weightless computers practically too cheap to sell.

  But the difference between “practically” and “absolutely” meant a lot, across millions of units.

  I2—the age of Immanent Information—was about to commence.

  A visit to the same canny lawyer who had helped his parents survive bankruptcy nearly twenty years earlier insured that Bash’s invention was securely patented. Anyone who wanted to employ Bash’s process would have to license it from him, for a considerable annual fee.

  At this point, the nineteen-year-old Bash went public.

  By the time he was twenty-one, he was the richest man in the world.

  But he had still never even ventured out on a date with any member of the opposite sex who was not his cousin Cora on his mother’s side.

  3

  The Breakfast Club

  Dagny Winsome resembled no one so much as a pale blonde Olive Oyl. Affecting retro eyeglasses in place of the universal redactive surgery to correct her nearsightedness, Dagny exhibited a somatotype that evoked thoughts of broomsticks, birches, baguettes and, given her predilection for striped shirts, barber poles. But her lack of curvature belied a certain popularity with males, attributable to her quick wit, wild impulsiveness and gleeful subversiveness. Her long pale hair framed a face that could segue from calm innocence to irate impatience to quirky amusement in the span of a short conversation. Dagny’s four years at MIT had been marked by participation in a score of famous hacks, including the overnight building of a two-thirds mockup of the Space Shuttle George W. Bush resting in a simulated crash in the middle of Massachusetts Avenue.

  Bash stood in awe of Dagny from the minute he became aware of her and her rep. A year ahead of Bash and several years senior in age, yet sharing his major, Dagny had seemed the unapproachable apex of sophistication and, yes, feminine allure. Often he had dreamed of speaking to her, even asking her on a date. But he had never summoned up the requisite courage.

  Dagny graduated, and Bash’s senior year was overtaken by the heady proteopape madness. For the next decade he had heard not a word of her postcollege career. Despite some desultory networking throughout the IT community, Bash had been unable to learn any information concerning her. Apparently she had not employed her degree in any conventional manner.

  So in Bash’s heart, Dagny Winsome gradually became a faded yet still nostalgia-provoking ghost.

  Until the day just two weeks ago, on June 11, when she turned up on his doorstep.

  Women were not in the habit of showing up at the front entrance of Bash’s home. For one thing, Bash lived in seclusion in a fairly well-secured mansion in the exclusive town of Lincoln, Massachusetts. Although no live guards or trained animals patrolled the grounds of his homestead, the fenced estate boasted elaborate cybernetic barriers wired both to nonlethal antipersonnel devices and to various agencies who were primed to respond at a moment’s notice to any intrusion. Bash was not particularly paranoid, but as the world’s richest individual he was naturally the focus of many supplicants, and he cherished his privacy.

  Also, Bash did not experience a steady flow of female callers since he remained as awkward with women as he had been at nineteen. Although not technically a virgin any longer at age thirty, he still failed to deeply comprehend the rituals of human courtship and mating. Sometimes he felt that the shortened form of his name stood for “Bashful” rather than “Basho.”

  Naturally, then, Bash was startled to hear his doorbell ring early one morning. He approached the front door tentatively. A curling sheet of proteopape carelessly thumbtacked to the inner door conveyed an image of the front step transmitted from a second sheet of proteopape hanging outside and synched to the inner one. (When weather degraded the outside sheet of proteopape to uselessness, Bash would simply hang a new page.)

  Imagine Bash’s surprise to witness Dagny Winsome standing impatiently before his front door. After a short flummoxed moment, Bash threw wide the door.

  “Dag – Dagny? But how –?”

  Ten years onward from graduation, Dagny Winsome retained her collegiate looks and informality. She wore one of her trademark horizontally striped shirts, red and black. Her clunky eyeglasses incorporated enough plastic to form a car bumper. Her long near-platinum hair had been pulled back and secured by a jeweled crab, one of the fashionable ornamental redactors that metabolized human sweat and dead skin cells. Black jeans and a pair of NeetFeets completed her outfit.

  Dagny said with some irritation, “Well, aren’t you going to invite your old fellow alumna inside?”

  “But how did you get past my security?”

  Dagny snorted. “You call that gimcrack setup a security system? I had it hacked while my car was still five miles outside of town. And I only drove from Boston.”

  Bash made a mental note to install some hardware and software upgrades. But he could not, upon reflection, manufacture any ire against either his deficient cyberwards or Dagny herself. He was pleased to see her.

  “Uh, sorry about my manners. Sure, come on in. I was just having breakfast. Want something?”

  Dagny stepped briskly inside. “Green tea and a poppy-seed muffin, some Canadian bacon on the side.”

  Bash reviewed the contents of his large freezer. “Uh, can do.”

  Seated in the kitchen, sipping their drinks while bacon microwaved, neither one spoke for some time. Dagny focused a dubious look on the decorative strip of proteopape wallpaper running around the upper quarter of the kitchen walls. A living frieze, the accent strip displayed a constantly shifting video of this year’s Sports Illustrated swimsuit models, at play in the Sino-Hindu space station, Maohatma. Embarrassed, Bash decided that to change the contents now would only accentuate the original bachelor’s choice, so he fussed with the microwave while admiring Dagny out the corner of his eye.

  Serving his guest her muffin and bacon, Bash was taken aback by her sudden confrontational question.

  “So, how long are you going to vegetate here like some kind of anaerobe?”

  Bash dropped into his seat. “Huh? What do you mean?”

  Dagny waved a braceleted arm to sweep in the whole house. “Just look around. You’ve fashioned yourself a perfect little womb here. First you go and drop the biggest conceptual bombshell into the information society that the world has ever seen. Intelligent paper! Then you crawl into a hole with all your riches and pull the hole in after yourself.”

  “That’s ridiculous. I — I’m still engaged with the world. Why, just last year I filed five patents — ”

  “All piddling little refinements on proteopape. Face it, you’re just dicking around with bells and whistles now. You’ve lost your edge. You don’t really care about the biz or its potential to change the world anymore.”

  Bash tried to consider Dagny’s accusations objectively. His life was still full of interests and passions, wasn’t it? He ran a big A-life colony that had kicked some butt in the annual Conway Wars; he composed songs on his full-body SymphonySuit, and downloads from his music website had hit an all-time high last week (
53); and he was the biggest pear-orchard owner in Oregon’s Rogue River Valley (the holding corporation was run by York and Adelaide). Didn’t all those hobbies and several others speak to his continuing involvement in the world at large? Yet suddenly Bash was unsure of his own worth and meaning. Did his life really look trivial to an outsider?

  Irked by these novel sensations, Bash sought to counterattack. “What about you? I don’t see where you’ve been exactly burning up the I2 landscape. How have you been improving the world since school?”

  Dagny was unflustered. “You never would have heard of anything I’ve done, even though I’ve got quite a rep in my field.”

  “And what field is that?”

  “The art world. After graduation, I realized my heart just wasn’t in the theoretical, R&D side of I2. I was more interested in the creative, out-of-the-box uses the street had for stuff like proteopape than in any kind of engineering. I wanted to use nifty new tools to express myself, not make them so others could. So I split to the West Coast in ′17, and I’ve been mostly there ever since. Oh, I travel a lot—the usual swirly emergent nodes like Austin, Prague, Havana, Hong Kong, Helsinki, Bangor. But generally you can find me working at home in LA.”

  The list of exciting cities dazzled Bash more than he expected it to, and he realized that for all his immense wealth he had truly been leading a cloistered existence.

  “What brings you to stuffy old Boston then?”

  “The Woodies. It’s an awards ceremony for one of the things I do, and it’s being held here this year. A local group, the Hubster Dubsters, is sponsoring the affair. It’s kind of a joke, but I have to be there if I want to front as a player. So I figured, Bash lives out that way. What if I look him up and invite him to come along.”